It was the knowledge that in only one more year, the process of getting this right will commence.

The system that sent Notre Dame to the national championship game because it had not lost a game and because the human voters and the statistical data preferred it, has one more year to run. Starting in the 2014 season, a still-far-from-perfect playoff system replaces it.

That four-team system won’t end the arguments about who deserves to compete for the title; it just redirects and re-phrases it. It will still be a better direction and a more preferable phrasing.

Plus, the anticipation for the product of even one round of playoffs will utterly eclipse anything that’s come before it. The build-up for the meeting of two of the most historic brand names in college football Monday? Just multiply that by about a gazillion.

The powers-that-be know this, or else they wouldn’t be doing it. You just wish that it would hurry up and get here, even more so after the pants-down spanking Alabama administered.

Imagine how much America would have been starving for that Notre Dame-Alabama matchup, had it felt that much more strongly that both teams had earned their way there.

You know, by facing another contender the week before and proving that they belonged. Imagine if the unbeaten Irish had fought its way through Oregon, or Georgia, or Florida, or Kansas State, or Texas A&M, or Stanford. Just to name a few programs and fan bases that would scream bloody murder if turned down for the four-team field. (Ohio State faithful: no, you’re not included there. Don’t pretend you don’t know why.)

Feel free to imagine if one-loss Alabama had been required to do the same thing, by the way. If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re already imagining it, and fighting back the tears.

Get into that quartet—after raging against the seed and the matchup and the game site, of course—and win your way into the title game, and then just let the drama build. Not for 44 days, either.

The week or so heading into the game, and the game itself, would be, to borrow a phrase … Madness.

The result could end up the same then as it did Monday, of course. Or the way it did after the 2010 season, the first time Alabama won under this format, over Texas. Or in ’07 and ’08, when Ohio State left the nation’s fans griping at the same volume as they are now.

“What did they do to get in there?” we’re all lamenting.

Yes, lots of hindsight in that, but everyone who watched closely all season—not just Notre Dame, everybody—had an inkling that the Irish were suspect, and that if thrown into a field of the true elite, they ran the chance of getting exposed.

Playoff games are good at exposing teams, especially in this sport. Everybody has known that for years. It just took the bosses of the sport to stop their infighting, grasping and favor-swapping long enough to recognize and do something about it.

So, yes, there’s little doubt that Notre Dame would have been in that Final Four had it been conducted this year. It might have passed that first test, then run head-first into the same Alabama team. It might have found itself in a hole almost immediately and never come close to climbing out of it.

Televisions might have clicked off from coast-to-coast the same way. The broadcast crew might have gone to its blowout material just as early, led by the same pre-pubescent slobbering over the aforementioned beauty queen in the stands.

But at least nobody would have said, “They should have never set this thing up. (Team X) should’ve gotten a chance. They deserved it.”

The favored choice of the masses for Team X on Monday night was Oregon, mainly because the memory of the Ducks’ Fiesta Bowl steamrolling of Kansas State was fresher than that of their more-pedestrian regular-season fall against Stanford.

For what it’s worth, there was nearly as much anticipation of that Fiesta Bowl—a face-off between the teams ranked 1-2 in mid-November, just before Notre Dame became the last perfect team standing—as there was of the BCS final. The eagerness for the Texas A&M-Oklahoma Cotton Bowl three days before Notre Dame-Alabama was not far behind, even though that was nobody’s version of a possible Final Four matchup.

Throw those games into the new format after next season—or, better, the format that will eventually replace it, with eight teams—and you’ve got yourself a real postseason, instead of the poor imitation we’ve been fed over the years.

We have to endure just one more year of that poor imitation. Then, it gets real.